WEIGHT MANAGEMENT
Many Americans view a healthy lifestyle as something difficult to attain--and something that's not much fun. Traditional diets have taught us that to lose weight, we must count calories, keep track of everything we eat, and deprive ourselves by limiting the amount--and kinds--of foods we eat. Diets tell us exactly what and how much food to eat, regardless of our preferences and individual relationships with hunger and satiety. Dieting can help us lose weight (fat, muscle, and water) in the short term but is so unnatural and so unrealistic that it can never become a lifestyle that we can live with, let alone enjoy!
While very few diets teach healthy low-fat shopping, cooking, and dining-out strategies, many offer unrealistic recommendations and encourage health-threatening restrictions. Even more important, diets don't teach us the safest, most effective ways to exercise; they don't teach us how to deal with our cravings and our desires, or how to attend to our feelings of hunger and fullness. Eventually, we become tired of the complexity, the hunger, the lack of flavor, the lack of flexibility, the lack of energy, and the feeling of deprivation. We quit our diets and gain back the weight we've lost; sometimes we gain even more!
Deprivation Doesn't Work!
Each time we go on another diet of deprivation, the weight becomes more difficult to lose, and we become even more frustrated and discouraged. Then we eat more and exercise less, causing ourselves more frustration, discouragement, depression. Soon we are in a vicious cycle. We begin to ask ourselves, "Why bother?" We begin to blame ourselves for having no will power when what we really need is clear, scientifically-based information that will help us develop a healthier lifestyle we can live with for the rest of our lives.
The Weight Management component of the Global Health and Fitness (GHF) program is not a diet that you'll quit because it's too difficult or because you've reached a six-month weight-loss goal. GHF offers a healthier way of eating and a happier way of living. We offer a realistic, sensible approach to food and a more fun and more effective approach to exercise. We teach you how to gradually adopt those new behaviors so that they become part of an improved way of life, one without guilt, without rules, and without deprivation.
Small, Gradual Changes: An Effective Alternative
If your weight management program is to be a success, everything you eat and every exercise you do must be a pleasurable experience. If you're not enjoying yourself, it is unlikely that you'll continue your program. It's that simple.
These small, gradual changes are not painful or overwhelming but rather the core of an exciting lifestyle that you will look forward to.
GHF offers easy-to-understand and easy-to-follow recommendations on shopping for and cooking low-fat healthy foods. We'll also discuss simple ways of reducing the fat in the foods you choose when you eat out. You'll learn about the many nonfat and low-fat ingredients that can reduce the fat in your favorite recipes without reducing taste. We'll explain why you should reduce dietary fat and just how much fat your daily diet should include for your optimum health. You'll also learn the roles that carbohydrates, protein, fiber, and water play in an effective weight management program.
In addition, GHF will provide you with over 175 healthy recipes, low in fat and high in nutritional value. We know, however, that foods must be more than just healthy. They must also be delicious and visually appealing, or you probably won't eat them. The foods must also be quick and easy to prepare, or you probably won't make them. The GHF recipes are foods you'll enjoy again and again.
Many cookbooks and diet programs reduce the fat in recipes by using artificial sweeteners and fat substitutes; they may also rely on highly refined and processed foods. Unfortunately, these practices compromise nutrition. On the other hand, the GHF recommendations are easy-to-follow recipes for delicious, well-balanced meals. They include techniques for reducing the fat and increasing the nutritional value of your own favorite foods.
Cardiovascular Exercise and Strength Training Are Crucial
Many so-called healthy diets are too narrow, focusing as they do solely on nutrition and calorie reduction. They tend to ignore the other two vital components of an effective weight management program: cardiovascular exercise and strength training. Someone with the healthiest possible eating habits will still have a hard time achieving the desired results of body shape and fitness without an effective exercise program because success--and good health in general--depends on a safe and effective combination of cardiovascular fitness and stronger bones and muscles. That is why GHF offers an integrated program.
The Dangers of Excess Body Fat
Most people's primary motivation for weight management is to improve their appearance. Equally important, however, are the many other benefits of proper nutrition and regular exercise.
Weight management through reduction of excess body fat plays a vital role in maintaining good health and fighting disease. In fact, medical evidence shows that obesity poses a major threat to health and longevity. (The most common definition of obesity is more than 25 percent body fat for men and more than 32 percent for women.) An estimated one in three Americans has some excess body fat; an estimated 20 percent are obese.
Excess body fat is linked to major physical threats like heart disease, cancer, and diabetes. (Three out of four Americans die of either heart disease or cancer each year; according to the National Health and Nutrition Examination survey, approximately 80 percent of those deaths are associated with life-style factors, including inactivity.)
For example, if you're obese, it takes more energy for you to breathe because your heart has to work harder to pump blood to the lungs and to the excess fat throughout the body. This increased work load can cause your heart to become enlarged and can result in high blood pressure and life-threatening erratic heartbeats.
Obese people also tend to have high cholesterol levels, making them more prone to arteriosclerosis, a narrowing of the arteries by deposits of plaque. This becomes life-threatening when blood vessels become so narrow or blocked that vital organs like the brain, heart or kidneys are deprived of blood. Additionally, the narrowing of the blood vessels forces the heart to pump harder, and blood pressure rises. High blood pressure itself poses several health risks, including heart attack, kidney failure, and stroke. About 25 percent of all heart and blood vessel problems are associated with obesity.
Clinical studies have found a relationship between excess body fat and the incidence of cancer. By itself, body fat is thought to be a storage place for carcinogens (cancer-causing chemicals) in both men and women. In women, excess body fat has been linked to a higher rate of breast and uterine cancer; in men, the threat comes from colon and prostate cancer.
There is also a delicate balance between blood sugar, body fat, and the hormone insulin. Excess blood sugar is stored in the liver and other vital organs; when the organs are "full," the excess blood sugar is converted to fat. As fat cells themselves become full, they tend to take in less blood sugar. In some obese people, the pancreas produces more and more insulin, which the body can't use, to regulate blood sugar levels, and the whole system becomes overwhelmed. This poor regulation of blood sugar and insulin results in diabetes, a disease with long-term consequences, including heart disease, kidney failure, blindness, amputation, and death. Excess body fat is also linked to gall bladder disease, gastro-intestinal disease, sexual dysfunction, osteoarthritiis, and stroke.
Reducing Body Fat Reduces Disease Risk
The good news is that reducing body fat reduces the risk of disease. At the University of Pittsburgh, researchers studied 159 people as they followed a weight management program. The subjects were under age 45 and 30-70 pounds overweight. Those subjects who were able to shed just 10-15 percent of their weight and keep it off during the 18-month study showed significant improvement in HDL cholesterol and triglyceride levels, waist-to-hip ratio, and blood pressure. In fact, according to the New England Journal of Medicine, body fat reduction is a more powerful modulator of cardiac structure than drug therapy.
For people with a family history of heart disease, an active lifestyle can slow or stop the process for all but those with serious genetic disorders. Studies by Dean Ornish, MD, have shown that a comprehensive intervention program that includes regular physical activity, a low-fat diet and a stress reduction program can even reverse the heart disease process.
Evidence also shows that an active lifestyle and its help in reducing body fat is associated with a reduced risk for some types of cancers: prostate for men, breast and uterine cancers for women. (Frisch, et al 1985)
In addition, regular physical activity and a low-fat diet are successful in treating non-insulin dependent diabetes (NIDDM); for some patients, it has reduced or eliminated the need for insulin substitutes. In general, regularly active adults have 42 percent lower risk of developing NIDDM.
Gaining Weight Happens to Most of Us
The average American gains at least one pound a year after age 25. Think about it. If you're like most Americans, by the time you're 50, you're likely to gain 25 pounds of fat, or more. In addition, your metabolism is also slowing down, causing your body to work less efficiently at burning the fat it has. At the same time, if you don't exercise regularly, you lose a pound of muscle each year. Consequently, people are not only increasing their body fat stores, increasing their risk of disease, but they're also losing muscle, increasing the risk of injury, decreasing activity performance, and further slowing down metabolism.
Very few Americans exercise in any significant way. The President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports estimates that only one in five Americans exercises for the healthy minimum of 20 minutes, three or more days a week. In fact, the average American gets less than 50 minutes of exercise per week. Even worse, two out of five Americans are completely sedentary.
The Answer: Healthy Eating and Physical Fitness
But there is hope. Moderate weight loss--of fat, not muscle--and a healthy and active lifestyle--not dieting--have been found to lower health risks and medical problems in 90 percent of overweight patients, improving their heart function, blood pressure, glucose tolerance, sleep disorders, and cholesterol levels, as well as lowering their requirements for medication, lowering the incidence and duration of hospitalization, and reducing post-operative complications eight times less likely to die from cancer than the unfit, and 53 percent less likely to die from other diseases. Fit people are also eight times less likely to die from heart disease.
The integrated program of GHF can help you adapt your lifestyle to one of better health. And help you become one of those fit people.
More Bad News About Dieting
Deliberate restriction of food intake in order to lose weight or to prevent weight gain, known as dieting, is the path that millions of people all over the world are taking in order to reach a desired body weight or appearance. Preoccupation with body shape, size, and weight creates an unhealthy lifestyle of emotional and physical deprivation. Diets take control away from us.
Many of us who diet get caught in a "yo-yo" cycle that begins with low self-acceptance and results in structured eating and living because we lack trust in our body and are unwilling to listen and adhere to our body's signals of hunger and fullness. On diets, we distrust and ignore internal signs of appetite, hunger, and our need to be physically and psychologically satisfied. Instead, we depend on diet plans, measured portions, and a prescribed frequency for eating.
As a result, many of us have lost the ability to eat in response to our physical needs; we experience feelings of deprivation, then binge, and finally terminate our "health" program. This in turn leads to guilt, defeat, weight gain, low self-esteem, and then we're back to the beginning of the yo-yo diet cycle. Rather than making us feel better about ourselves, diets set us up for failure and erode our self-esteem.
Adhering to diet plans leads to perfectionist tendencies that in turn can result in a loss of control. People with the diet mentality have a perception of foods as either "good" (diet foods) or "bad" (binge foods); they see foods as coming in "good" amounts (small/low-calorie) or "large" amounts (diet-breaking). When we dieters eat "bad" foods or "large" amounts, we tend to believe we have "blown" our diet for the day or the weekend so we might as well binge further and start over the next day.
The Dos and Don'ts of Dieting Don't Do It
Following the list of foods that a diet allows or forbids us is really only feasible in the short term. If we don't change our tastes and preferences so we learn to enjoy foods lower in fat and higher in nutritional value, we will feel more and more restricted. And eventually we will resume our former eating habits because we still have a preference for high-fat foods.
When you diet, a piece of pizza is sinful; eating cake and ice cream makes you a bad person. A missed workout means skipping dinner and doing hundreds of crunches. A planned dinner engagement requires skipping breakfast and having just a piece of fruit for lunch. You refuse a dinner party for fear of being tempted with food you haven't "earned" or calories you haven't "saved."
The attitudes and practices acquired through years of dieting are likely to result in a body weight and size obsession, low self-esteem, poor nutrition and excessive or inadequate exercise. Weight loss from following a rigid diet is usually temporary. Most diets are too drastic to maintain; they are unrealistic and unpleasant; they are physically and emotionally stressful. And most of us just resume our old eating and activity patterns. Diets control us; we are not in control. People who try to live by diet lists and rules learn little or nothing about proper nutrition and how to enjoy their meals, physical activity, and a healthy lifestyle. No one can realistically live in the diet mode for the rest of their life, depriving themselves of the true pleasures of healthy eating and activity.
We Don't Fail Diets; They Fail Us!
Decades of research have shown that diets, both self-initiated and professionally-led, are ineffective at producing long-term health and weight loss (or weight control). When your diet fails to keep the weight off, you may say to yourself, "If only I didn't love food so much . . . If I could just exercise more often . . . If I just had more will power." The problem is not personal weakness or lack of will power. Only 5 percent of people who go on diets are successful. Please understand that we are not failing diets; diets are failing us.
Last Year, More Than 34 Million Americans Tried Diets!
Diets have made us more aware of calories. However, controlling your body weight through calorie-counting is almost impossible. The National Institutes of Health recently completed a 20-year study of traditional low-calorie diets to see if they really helped people lose weight and keep it off. The diet plans studied included Weight Watchers®, Jenny Craig®, The Diet Center® and most other traditional diet programs and diet fads. The study concluded that traditional low-calorie diet plans have a 95 percent failure rate; i.e., 95 percent of the people on the plans gained back all of the weight they had lost within a few years. Most people gained back the weight during the next year! In fact, most people gain an additional five pounds after each dieting cycle.
The reason 95 percent of all traditional diets fail is simple. When you go on a low-calorie diet, your body thinks you are starving; it actually becomes more efficient at storing fat by slowing down your metabolism. When you stop this unrealistic eating plan, your metabolism is still slow and inefficient that you gain the weight back even faster, even though you may still be eating less than you were before you went on the diet.
In addition, low-calorie diets cause you to lose both muscle and fat in equal amounts. However, when you eventually gain back the weight, it is all fat and not muscle, causing your metabolism to slow down even more. Now you have extra weight, a less healthy body composition, and a less attractive physique.
Diets require you to sacrifice by being hungry; they don't allow you to enjoy the foods you love. This does not teach you habits which you can maintain after the diet is over. Most diet programs force you to lower your caloric intake to dangerously low levels. The common theory is that if you eat fewer calories than you burn, you will lose weight. But when you eat fewer calories than your body needs to maintain its life-sustaining activities, you're actually losing muscle in addition to fat. Your body breaks down its own muscles to provide the needed energy for survival. There's more.
All Calories Are Not Created Equal!
There are lean-supporting calories and fat-supporting calories; they are derived from three sources in food: carbohydrates, proteins, and fats. The calories provided by fat actually convert to body fat faster and more easily than calories from carbohydrates or proteins. In other words, carbohydrates and proteins are more likely to support the conversion of food to lean mass, such as muscle, bone, internal organs, and essential body fluids, while fats are more likely to support the storage of body fat. It's mostly the fat in food that ends up as body fat, unlike most of the carbohydrates and protein we consume which are used for supporting muscle and energy. By replacing high-fat foods with energy-producing carbohydrates and muscle-supporting protein, you can lose body fat and improve your health without the hazards of dieting.
The Psychological Risks of Dieting
Not only does dieting have the potential to harm our bodies, it can also our harm our psyches. Unsuccessful attempts at long-term weight loss can seriously affect our psychological well-being. The increasing failure that comes with each weight loss attempt can further diminish our already low self-esteem and increase our risk of depression. Unfortunately, when this happens to us, we assume erroneously that the fault lies with us and not with the real culprit, the diet itself.
Other psychological risks of dieting include an obsession with body weight and size, disordered eating patterns which may increase the risk of developing an eating disorder, and an increased pressure to try to conform to society's standard of thinness. All of these problems tend to further weaken our ability to deal with food and our bodies in a healthy way.
Dieting: A Poor Role Model for Children
Consider for a moment the messages that dieting sends to our children. Parents who are constantly dieting and who are unhappy with their body often indicate to their child that he or she is also not okay and needs to go on a diet. Feelings of inadequacy and a reinforcement of the diet mentality can come from any of the following:
- Using food as a reward, as comfort, or as a form of control.
- Making children clean their plates as proof that they're "good" or in order to earn dessert rather than teaching them to tune into internal signals of fullness and satiety.
- Centering holiday festivities on food rather than emphasizing the meaning of the occasion itself, friendship, conversation, family activities.
- Relying on diet products like Slim-Fast® that don't allow children to acquire a taste for low-sugar foods.
Many times, we are just passing on attitudes about food and our bodies that we got from our parents. The GHF approach to health and weight management can help you break this cycle.
As you implement the important principles of the GHF Weight Management program into your lifestyle and begin tuning in to your body for signals of hunger and fullness, and enjoy physical activity, you will notice that the positive attitudes and healthy behaviors will transfer to your children. When you start living a healthier lifestyle, you'll notice a sense of inner satisfaction. When people take responsibility for their own health, their family is positively affected.
GHF Will Move You In Another Direction
Traditional diets which use calorie restriction to produce weight loss are no longer appropriate. Most weight-loss programs measure success solely in terms of the number of pounds lost per weight loss attempt. Diets don't take into account the quality of the process used to achieve that weight loss or the very small likelihood of sustained weight loss. For long-term good health, you need to move away from low-calorie diets and focus on enjoyable physical activity and good nutrition. Exercising regularly and eating lean-supporting calories, protein and carbohydrates, and reducing fat-supporting calories will not only help you look and feel better, it will also significantly reduce your risk of disease.
GHF will show you how to take the frustration, guilt, and deprivation out of weight management, allowing you to adopt gradual, realistic changes into your life that will make healthy eating and physical activity a permanent pleasure. You will soon discover what your body is capable of and begin enjoying the many benefits of fitness and good health!
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